Horror Psychology|Daring the Nightmare

The doomsday clock is ticking as I get closer and closer to needing to get my thesis on horror done. The experiment is finished, the results have been computed (as disappointing as they were) and it is now time to get writing, but I can’t. I have been in a funk for the last 10 days or so and I feel like I have lost a little something. My passion, drive, Lacanian phantasm; Who knows? So I decided that I have ignored by blog a little too much these last few months and I needed to write something that wasn’t necessarily academic.

Today I read an article by Matt Cardin, who runs a fantastic blog about the dark side of creativity and human nature called the Teeming Brain. If you like horror you need to be reading this blog. Today he posted this article in which he shares a quote about why it is that horror fans enjoy horror and it says

 “It’s the same reason we climb a cliff and put our foot out over the open air and pull back. We’re daring the nightmare. You never feel more alive than in that moment.” -Benjamin Percy (emphasis added)

Daring the nightmare. Psychology has been trying to understand nightmares since Freud first postulated the interpretation of dreams. But what does it mean to dare the nightmare? To me it seemed like there were two ways to take it. You can take it in the context that the author put it, much like young children will dare one another to got and stand on the porch of an abandoned, and therefore certainly haunted, house. One gets as close to the edge of reason as can be safely done, brushes with horror, and then pulls away. I think many casual horror fans are like this. It is a test of courage, usually a social one, to prove ones,at least in the case of little boys at a “haunted house”, testicular fortitude. How much gross, how much shock, how much ichor can I stand before one has to turn away?

I feel however that there is one more way in which ones goes about daring the nightmare, one simply turns the tables of dare. You walk into nightmare’s realm with a boom-stick in your hands, crying out “Have at thee”. This is daring the nightmare, challenging it to bring on its worst onslaught of irrational and insane rules of engagement. But why would you do this to yourself? Why engage in horror this way? I don’t know if I have an answer to that. Horror authors have said a lot on this idea: King, Ligotti, Lovecraft, M.R.James and few others, but I don’t know if they are right either.

I started out this project of horror psychology actively avoiding the questions about  the Why of horror, and trying to first establish the question What is horror. However, what I have found is that in horror psychology, just as in horror itself, all the lines are blurry and the regular rules do not seem to apply. I think that I have arrived to the conclusion that in horror psychology, when one dares the nightmare, you find out what horror is; you find out what scares you; what absolutely petrifies you, and you know that it could never have been anything else. All that is left is to ask why. Why this and not that? If we always knew what it was we would find why did we bother going to seek it?  For now I must dare the nightmare that is getting my thesis done. A prospect that sometimes leaves me truly horror struck.

What are your thoughts?   What do you think it means to dare the nightmare? Do you think the What and the Why are blurred or are they separate?

Lovecraft Quotes | Those who search for horror

“Searchers after horror haunt strange, far places”

– H.P. Lovecraft  The Picture in the House

I love this opening line from The Picture in the House, which by far is one of the creepiest stories that I have ever read, and in my opinion is probably the source for the cannibal/mutant yokel trope that you find in horror movies like The Hills have Eyes, Wrong Turn, Texas Chainsaw massacre,etc. But back to the quote, I have often found myself in many a strange and far place, sometime on purpose and sometime on accident, and encountered horror. From graveyards across the US, abandoned farmsteads and ghost towns in parts of the Old West, to haunted swamps in Brazil, I have found many a weird and eerie phenomenon. Sometime I left in wonder and other times I left horror struck.

What experience have you had? Were you searching for horror or did horror find you?

Horror Short Stories | The Yellow Wallpaper

I don’t know how I missed this story as almost everyone I know says that they read this in high school. I had to spend my high school days slogging through reading things like My Antonia and Pride and Prejudice *Shudder*. Wouldn’t P&P have been a better story if Elizabeth Bennett slipped into gibbering insanity at the end of the story?

Photo from: University of Minnesota Theatre Arts & Dance

The Yellow Wallpaper is horror short story written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, which you can read or listen to here, that tells the tale a woman’s decent into madness as she is confined to her bedroom by her husband because of her “”temporary nervous depression – a slight hysterical tendency,”, and slowly loses her mind in the grotesque yellow wallpaper, first finding women trapped in it, then to trying to help the woman escape, followed by becoming the woman herself. It is an eerie story whose last lines sent chills up my spine:

 He stopped short by the door.

“What is the matter?” he cried. “For God’s sake, what are you doing!”

I kept on creeping just the same, but I looked at him over my shoulder.

“I’ve got out at last,” said I, “in spite of you and Jane. And I’ve pulled off most of the paper, so you can’t put me back!”

Now why should that man have fainted? But he did, and right across my path by the wall, so that I had to creep over him every time!

There are many criticisms and interpretations of the Yellow Wallpaper and if you want to check out a summed up version you can do so here.

What I want to do is take a look at this story from the lens of the Horror Struck project. Dealing with the decent into madness, a horror psychology theme can easily be drawn from this story. While reading this story the work of psychoanalysts Melanie Kline and early work Jacques Lacan came to mind, specifically the idea of subject/object split. In psychoanalysis under normal circumstances we all learn to separate ourselves from the world around us, this is usually learned during infancy. However in the case of a psychotic this ability is lost or never learned, for a example a psychotic may see a glass fall and shatter  and suddenly they feel as if they have shattered as well. In the Yellow Wallpaper  we see the decent into madness and this very ability slipping from our heroine. Her mind becomes the pattern of the yellow wallpaper and the pattern becomes her, even to the extent that her delusions of the woman who is, at first a stranger,who is being imprisoned in the wallpaper than she identifies herself as being the woman. The subject and the object cease to be separated.

As far as the type of horror goes, this horror short story, is a great example of the horror of personality. Our protagonist is trying to make find meaning in her very controlled and choice-less confinement, however in her attempts to find meaning she loses her sanity and her ability to make meaning-full choices, she must now compulsively “creep” along, trapped in the groove in the wall,  just as trapped now as she ever was within the Yellow Wallpaper. The scary thing “out there” is really the scary thing “in here with me”.

There is an ambiguity in this story that causes us to wonder where the madness stops and truth begins, is it a decent into madness or is it, as in McGrath’s Spider, the protagonist has always been a raving lunatic and we only think that there was a decent into madness. Ambiguity is the key to horror, whether it is the experienced through an unreliable narrator or in the very real hell of the psychotic who spends every day wondering “Am I the glass or is the glass me?” either way unresolved ambiguity never fails to leave us horror struck.

Do you agree or disagree about ambiguity being a key to horror? Why or why not? Thoughts?

Welcome to Horror Struck

“Men of broader intellect know that there is no sharp distinction betwixt the real and the unreal…” H. P. Lovecraft.

Welcome to Horror Struck.

Here I hope to explore the vast reaches of the horror genre in a unique way. Horror is a genre rife with opinions. I find that most people are on a spectrum ranging from those that love to hate it, writing it off as a hack genre, not worth the paper or film it is printed on; the casual perusers, those who enjoy a good scare every now and then; and the aficionado, who see horror as an exploration of the visceral man, both literally and figuratively.  I find myself somewhere between the casual and the aficionado, I love horror, but I am very picky about my horror. I believe there is a fundamental difference between the experiences we know as horror and fear. I will post more on this later, but in short, the physiological  roller-coaster we call fear is not the same as the value-challenging experience of horror, I believe this has made me picky. I don’t enjoy gut-ripping for the sake of gut-ripping, or blood sucking vampire sex scenes simply because you can put it in there. While violence and sex both have a well earned place in the horror conversation, they are all too often used, IMHO, to fill in for a poor ability to write horror.  Real horror should challenge us, make us uncomfortable with its message about the human condition, in short it should leave us Horror Struck.

As a graduate student of psychology I have often wondered what would come of a close look at the horror genre from a psychological perspective. What is it that leaves us horror struck? This blog will explore that. I have picked out various categories to explore, some to examine more closely and others to get you, the reader, to ponder more on what the horrific really is. Always looking for that moment when one is Horror Struck.

Types of horror: This will explore the types of horror that are out there, a list of things I have complied from my own research, the archetypes of horror if you will.

Horror Psychology: This category is will probably be more implicit than explicit. I will look at the psychological aspects of horror and what they mean as pertaining to the human experience.

Great Horror Books:  I read a lot of horror novels, in what little down time I have, here I will talk about some of the great horror books and there epic, and quiet, horrifying moments.

Horror Short Stories: As those who follow the horror genre know, the horror short story is the bread and butter of the genre, most of the best horror authors never wrote a novel, but were prodigious in the creation of short stories. We will look at these too.

Hollywood Horror Movies: Need I even mention this , horror has found a larger acceptance in this genre than in any other medium. I watch a lot of horror movies and I will explore them their themes and ideas here.

Lovecraft Mythos: One cannot talk about horror and not talk about Lovecraft. I opened this blog with a quote from him. Lovecraft opened up the gate for me into the realm of cosmic nightmare, and the mythos he spawned has influenced every aspect of the genre. We will look at his themes and contributions with a keen eye of interest.

Lovecraft Quotes: Some from his works of fiction and some from his letters. Lovecraft had a lot to say about the genre and I will post these to help us think about the horror genre.

Supernatural horror: I love the supernatural, I have had a few supernatural experiences myself, and my favorite kind of horror is of the supernatural variety. It’s my little indulgence and I know not everyone’s cup of tea, but I will try to keep things balanced.

I hope you enjoy your time here and that you feel free to participate in what I hope will be a exciting exploration of what happens when we  stare into the abyss and we stand horror-stricken when we realize that it gazes right back.